Dark Journey Of Faith

Hiker's Courage Compensates For Absence Of Sight

August 06, 1992|By MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON Daily Press

Bill Irwin celebrated his third year of sobriety by doing something that everybody else thought was crazy.

Despite having no previous hiking experience, the ex-alcoholic left his Burlington, N.C., home, hitched a ride to Springer Mountain, Ga., and started a nearly 2,200-mile walk to Maine along the Appalachian Trail.

When his journey finally ended nearly nine months later, the former chemist became one of fewer than 150 people who successfully complete the trip each season.

He also became the first person to make the difficult journey despite being totally blind.

Yet, for each difficult step he took, Irwin says, the passage inside his heart was harder.

Plagued by the failure of four marriages, a lifetime of alcoholism and his inability to grieve over the deaths of his parents, he sought an end to his personal torment as eagerly as the end of the trail.

By the time he finally reached Mt. Katahdin in Maine, both goals had been accomplished. Irwin's faith in God had made him a new man.

"It was a life-changing experience for me," he says, talking by phone from his home in North Carolina.

"I shed a lot of physical fat on the trail. I got rid of a lot of emotional fat, too."

Irwin, now 52, has chronicled his 1990 trip in the recently released book, "Blind Courage: A 2,000-mile Journey of Faith." He also retraced his steps for a nationwide television audience Monday on Virginia Beach evangelist Pat Robertson's "700 Club.''

His problems with alcohol, he says, started years before his vision was destroyed by a rare degenerative eye disease, chorioretinitis, in the late 1960s and early '70s. So did his troubles with marriage - he'd racked up two divorces by the time his sight disappeared completely in 1976.

His personal difficulties eventually grew to include two more failed marriages as well as increasingly strained relations with his three children. Then, in 1988, Irwin turned to Christianity and found a new life.

Soon, he began toying with the idea of a pilgrimage as a way to express his deepening convictions. Inspired by the example of Terry Fox, the young Canadian who walked across his country to demonstrate his defiance of cancer, Irwin decided to attempt an unprecedented journey up the Appalachian Trail.

His preparations included a week-long class with hiking veteran Warren Doyle, who tried unsuccessfully to discourage his blind pupil. He also took to the Burlington streets for increasingly long training walks with Orient, his German shepherd Seeing Eye dog.

"People started to notice that, instead of being five miles away from home, I'd be 15 miles away from where they thought I should be," he says.

"They'd stop and ask me if I wanted a ride home, and I'd say no. Only close friends and family knew what I was doing."

Irwin chose March 8, 1990 - the third anniversary of his sobriety - to begin his trek from the trailhead at Springer Mountain, Ga. He and Orient arrived in the middle of the biggest rainstorm to hit that part of the state in 70 years.

It took only a few yards for him to realize that the rocky Georgia landscape was a lot more rugged than the comparatively flat trail he'd practiced on in Harper's Ferry, W.Va. Then he stumbled over a startled Orient and took the first of what would become hundreds of knee-scarring falls.

"The dog is trained to stop for every small change in elevation," he explains, "and on the trail that's all there is."

"I'd fall 50 or 60 times a day in the beginning. A lot of times I fell right on top of him."

The reasons for Doyle's warnings became increasingly apparent as Irwin struggled through his first weeks of hiking. His 90-pound pack was too heavy. The ski poles he used as walking sticks either broke or became irretrievably lodged in the rocks.

The 3 1/2-year-old Orient, meanwhile, fared little better than his master. His protective leather boots snagged in the underbrush, exposing his feet to the harsh terrain. His backpack straps wore holes in his skin.

The pair also experienced nagging problems finding their way on the primitive trail. Fallen trees, downed by the season's heavy storms, continually slowed and confused their course.

Though Irwin estimates he never strayed more than a half-mile from the path, the detours around such "blow downs" helped slow his average pace to less than 13 miles a day.

"It's easy, when you're in your den with a roaring fire, to sit and talk about doing 25 miles a day," he says, laughing. "It's a whole 'nother thing to actually do it."

Halving the contents of his pack made Irwin's load lighter. He also adopted protective kneepads after the injuries of the first 1,000 miles.

His dog, meanwhile, toughened to both the demands of his knapsack and the rough surface of the mountainous path. Then, Irwin says, Orient made his most important and unexpected adjustment.

"About halfway through it became pretty apparent that he was able to read the trail blazes - the small white rectangles they paint on the trees and rocks to point the way," he says.